


Through this thunderous life

by viverella



Category: Hawkeye (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Deaf Clint Barton, F/M, I obviously have no idea how marriage or immigration laws work, Mail Order Brides, sort of implied past bobbi/clint if you squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-03
Updated: 2015-03-03
Packaged: 2018-03-13 05:59:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,591
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3370433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viverella/pseuds/viverella
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clint accidentally, drunkenly orders a mail order bride. Natasha arrives at his doorstep a week later. He has no idea what he just got himself into.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Through this thunderous life

**Author's Note:**

> this was originally supposed to be written for [this prompt](http://be-compromised.livejournal.com/449028.html?thread=8769028#t8769028) at the Be_Compromised Valentine's promptathon over on lj, but real life got the better of me and I didn't finish in time to make it to the promptathon. but the idea had already set up shop in my head because mail order spouse au is literally _my favorite au_ and I had like 3k words done by the time the deadline passed, so I just decided to finish it and post it? even though it's like super late now because I was like 'oh I can totally finish this in a couple extra days' and then real life punched me in the face again. so now it's like. two weeks late. and I'm not sure if I even like it anymore but it's done so I'm posting it. um. oops?
> 
> I don't know why so many of my au's turn out to be a little less au than originally intended, but I guess this is a little less au and a little more alternate origin story? maybe? idk. also please note that there are likely many legal inaccuracies here when it comes to how long couples have to remain together in situations like this, but we're just going to ignore that for the sake of this fic, okay? it makes the very vague timeline of this fic neater. sorry?  
>  
> 
> title borrowed from City and Colour

Clint wakes one morning to the sound of someone banging incessantly on his door and hopes, for one foolish moment, that maybe if he goes back to sleep, the real world and whoever is trying to bust his door down will cease to exist. When it doesn’t stop, he gropes for his alarm clock to check the time (it’s only like ten in the morning on a Saturday, what the _hell_ , who comes by this early?) before begrudgingly dragging himself out of bed. He has the foresight to throw on some clothing and stick his hearing aids in before going to the door (because he’s pretty sure it’s not Kate, because she wouldn’t come by this early, and if it’s not Kate, then that means he’s got to be at least somewhat ready to deal with Real People), which he’s glad of a moment later when he opens the door to find a beautiful redheaded woman he’s never seen before standing in front of him. 

“Clint Barton?” she asks, her words sharp and crisp. 

“Uh,” Clint manages, his voice coming up thick in his throat. He’s not entirely sure he’s not still asleep. “Yeah?”

The woman smiles, a look that’s not entirely unfriendly but carefully restrained surfacing on her face. “Natasha Romanoff,” she says, as if that explains everything. 

Clint blinks. “What?” he says, trying to remember if he’s met this woman before. He’s pretty sure he’d remember a face like that, the angular planes of her cheekbones, the full curve of her mouth. 

Natasha lets out a neat little sigh. “I’m your mail order bride,” she clarifies, matter-of-fact like this is the normal sort of thing people say when they’re introducing themselves. 

Clint blinks again, something settling in the pit of his stomach like panic. “ _What_ ,” he says, because, well, _what_. 

Natasha rolls her eyes and gestures past Clint towards the apartment. “May I?” she asks. 

Clint nods dumbly and steps aside to let her in, not sure what else to do with himself. Natasha picks up a couple duffle bags she has with her and hauls them into his apartment, setting them down with a surprisingly heavy _thunk_. She looks around at the mess that’s Clint’s constant roommate – dirty dishes piled in the sink, newspaper clippings stuck to the walls, broken arrows he’s been meaning to fix strewn all over – and lets out a breath. 

“You have a laptop or a computer or something?” she asks, and when Clint nods and gestures vaguely to where his laptop is wedged under several books with a forgotten cup of coffee perched at the top of the stack, Natasha goes over and unearths his laptop without batting an eye, all efficient movements and easy grace. She flips it open and starts poking around. 

“Uh, I’ve got a password on that,” Clint says, but he’s not even halfway done saying it when Natasha somehow manages to break into his laptop. 

She pulls up a webpage and clicks around before turning the screen towards him, hand on her hip. Clint takes this as an invitation to come closer, and when he inspects the screen, he finds what appears to be an online receipt for an order confirming that he, Clint Barton, did in fact order a mail order bride. Clint stares at his laptop screen and then stares at Natasha, who seems entirely unfazed by this all, who instead of freaking out, calmly produces a thin envelope from her coat pocket. Inside is a marriage certificate, definitely real, definitely legal. 

“So,” Natasha says after a long, generous moment to let him process the information. “You have a spare room or do you expect me to sleep on the couch?”

And because it’s still early and Clint’s not quite awake and hasn’t had his coffee yet and this is a really fucking weird situation to wrap his head around, his brain hasn’t quite caught up to everything that’s happening and all he ends up saying is, incredulously, “I’m married?” And then, after a beat, “Again?”

At that, for the first time all morning, a look of surprise crosses over Natasha’s face, her eyebrows arching up towards her hairline in an expression that’s somehow startled and unimpressed and a little amused all at once. It’s a look, Clint will later figure out, that he’s going to come to know very well.

\---

In Clint’s defense, he’s been having a pretty shitty month. The tracksuit-wearing mobsters haven’t been leaving his apartment building alone, and Clint just can’t quite get the upper hand on them. His past couple jobs with SHIELD have gone less than smoothly and he’s broken at least three fingers in the past few weeks trying to get everything to go the way he wants. He accidentally busted a neighbor’s satellite dish again, and there’s been a bad cold making its rounds, which means that he has a lot of unhappy tenants he’s had to deal with, and he loves his building and this neighborhood, he really does, but it’s been several weeks of days in which nothing seems to really go right, and he’s been exhausted and more than a little bit put out. So when Kate came by last week with a six-pack of beer and a handle of whisky to watch Dog Cops with him, getting disastrously drunk seemed like a good idea. 

Clint doesn’t really remember a lot from that night, but morning he’d spent puking his guts out and feeling like his head was about to split open told him that it was probably a night filled with bad decisions. Including, apparently, ordering a bride off the internet. 

Classy, Clint, real classy.

\---

Kate, because she’s terrible, just laughs when he tells her what happened. They’re out getting coffee after some light archery practice, and she laughs so hard she almost chokes on her drink. 

“Oh my _god_ ,” she says when she’s calmed down enough to talk. “Oh my god, I can’t believe you actually did it. I was joking when I suggested it.” And then she adds with a shrug, “Mostly.”

“Yeah, well I don’t remember any of it, so it hardly matters,” Clint grumbles, chewing on his coffee cup. Apparently, ordering a spouse was Kate’s suggestion of how to fight off the loneliness of being single in his late thirties. 

Kate laughs and nudges Clint’s arm with her shoulder. “Oh come on, it can’t be that bad,” she says, and she sounds like she’s at least considering being sincere about it. “I’m sure it’s nice to have a little more company.”

Clint shrugs, thinks about all the empty nights spent along with his dog, thinks that maybe Kate’s right, maybe he does need someone to keep him company sometimes. 

“I guess,” he assents and squints at the sun. “I just can’t believe I’m married again.”

\---

Natasha turns out to not be such a bad roommate. She’s neat and respectful and doesn’t push the wife thing too far like she can tell that Clint is still pretty uncomfortable with that part of their living arrangement. Natasha buys things for Clint’s spare bedroom, which is now her room, and makes things homey and cozy and soft, clean white sheets and tasteful posters on the walls and even a little string of fairy lights hung up around her closet. And then, something like a week after moving in, Natasha does something amazing, something Clint’s not sure if he’s ever done on his own. She _cleans_.

Clint leaves his apartment in the morning and when he comes back later that afternoon, he hardly recognizes it. Kate, stumbling in a moment after him, raises her eyebrows and lets out a low whistle. 

“Wow,” she says. “You can see the floor.”

Natasha’s bustling about, tossing things into boxes and gathering up armfuls of shirts and jackets and pants that have been carelessly tossed all over the furniture and probably need to be washed. She hums quietly to herself as she works, her hair tied up into a loose knot at the top of her head, and the whole scene – Natasha in the middle of Clint’s apartment that suddenly looks open and spacious in the way that it was supposed to look when it was built, clean countertops shining, carpet vacuumed and looking like something that resembles cream instead of dingy grey, the dishwasher whirring in the background – is so painfully domestic that Clint bites at the inside of his cheek to make sure he’s not dreaming. He’s never been domestic before. He’s not sure if he knows what to do with it. 

Natasha looks over when Clint walks in and offers a small smile. She dumps the clothing she’s carrying into a laundry basket she unearthed from somewhere and then gestures to a cluster of boxes on the floor by the door. 

“Look through those and tell me if there’s anything if you want to keep, okay?” she says. “I’m throwing everything else out.”

Clint frowns. “But that’s my stuff,” he says, sounding probably more offended than he means, and leans over to yank a couple broken arrows out of the mess. He can totally salvage these. “You can’t just toss it out.”

Natasha rests one hand on the kitchen counter and the other on her hip, a look of patient frustration settling onto her face. Clint winces. This is weird. 

“This place was a mess before I got here,” Natasha says. “A little order around here will do wonders to improve your mood.” And Clint wants to protest ( _hey, how did you know that I’ve been in a shitty mood for basically the past several months?_ ), but then Natasha adds, a little kinder now, “I guess if there’s stuff you really can’t bear to part with, we can put it in storage. But you can’t just let shit pile up when you’re not using it. I found some newspapers from literally ten years ago. You have to part with things sometimes.”

Clint lets out a sigh, hating a little bit how much sense she’s making, and Kate laughs, sounding entirely too gleeful. 

“Oh, I love her,” Kate whispers to Clint, before stepping forward and extending her hand for Natasha to shake. “I’m Kate. I’m a friend.”

Clint watches with amazement at the new expression that ripples over Natasha’s features like water, her mouth pulling up slightly and her eyes softening into something like amusement. Clint feels something snag in his throat and looks away, going back to digging through the boxes for valuables. 

“Are you the enabler of bad, drunken life choices?” Natasha asks, something light and teasing and familiar in her voice, like they’ve all been friends for years. 

Kate laughs again and says that yes, yes she is, and this makes Natasha laugh too, makes her say something like maybe she should thank Kate for enabling her to come to this country. There’s something surprisingly gentle about the sound that spills out of Natasha’s throat, almost delicate like bells despite her sharp features and the careful distance she’s maintained between her and Clint. Clint realizes maybe a moment too late that this is the first time he’s ever heard Natasha laugh, and he realizes later that night that this moment is the first time that this whole situation hasn’t felt odd. 

\---

Lucky, that traitor, _loves_ Natasha. It’s probably because while Clint’s out patrolling or going to various meetings and training sessions at SHIELD, Natasha’s at home, spoiling Lucky rotten. Clint keeps coming home and finding new dog toys everywhere and fancy dog treats and a new collar hanging around Lucky’s neck, and Clint doesn’t even know where Natasha’s getting all the money to buy these things, but the end result is that Clint is no longer Lucky’s favorite person. 

There’s one day when Clint comes home and Lucky comes bounding over, and Clint is excited for about half a second before Lucky tackles him and Clint realizes he’s soaking wet. And then Natasha comes running in and laughs and whistles softly. 

“C’mere, Lucky,” she beckons, and Lucky, damn him, actually goes to her.

Lucky licks lovingly at her face, and Natasha laughs, that high, clear sound that Clint has been adjusting to hearing almost every day. For all the initial carefulness around Clint, Natasha has turned out to be surprisingly warm, even if she is guarded, even though she has every reason to be wary about suddenly living in a stranger’s apartment. 

“You gave him a bath?” Clint asks, setting down his bow by the door. Lucky has trailed little wet footsteps all over the apartment. 

“Yeah,” Natasha says, the edges of laughter still coloring her voice. She rubs Lucky down with a towel and makes faces at him. “We went to the dog park this morning, and he got all muddy.” She glances up at Clint and smiles. “I was planning on getting some groceries in a bit. There’s a list on the counter if you want to add anything.”

Clint blinks, unable to stop the way that Natasha’s softness catches him off guard. He wanders over to the counter and stares at the shopping list without really seeing it, wondering what he’s supposed to do with all this. He hasn’t known this short of stability in a long time, not since the early days of being married last time around. 

“You can come if you want,” Natasha says, coming over to lean on the counter next to him. Behind them, Lucky shakes out his fur and then bumps at their legs. “I was thinking of taking Lucky out.”

And Clint means to take a long shower and maybe a nap, because he’s been out all morning and it’s exhausting sometimes trying to be a hero, but he finds himself on the street again a few minutes later, walking down the block next to Natasha. Lucky runs on ahead and turns back at the end of each block to make sure they’re still following him, and the wind kicks at the ends of Natasha’s hair from where it’s falling out of her loose braid. Her hands are shoved in her pockets and the edge of her elbow almost nudges against his with every step. Clint trails half a step behind her, wondering how this became his life, wondering why he feels so at home in this strange situation. 

Natasha glances over at Clint, her eyes wide and smiling, and the corner of her mouth turns up in what Clint thinks is amusement. “What’s wrong?” she asks, her voice floating high above the usual clamor of the street. 

Clint opens his mouth to respond and then shrugs when nothing comes out. “Nothing,” he mumbles eventually, a little startled by how much it feels like the truth.

\---

“How does one become a mail order bride anyways?” Kate asks one day as they watch reruns of Dog Cops together. 

Natasha’s out, running errands or finding new ways to spoil Lucky or whatever else she does to occupy her day. Clint doesn’t actually know what she does all day sometimes. He wonders if she gets bored.

“Uh,” Clint says, then shifts his weight. He slouches a little further into the couch. “I don’t know. Maybe you just… sign up somewhere or… y’know, something.”

Kate snorts. “Right,” she says. There’s a moment’s silence, and then she turns to him, lifting her legs to sit cross-legged on the couch. “Do you even know anything about her? Like, where is she from? Why is she doing this? If it were me, I’d want to get to know the woman who’s living in my apartment.”

Clint frowns at her and crosses his arms. “Well—I don’t know,” he says defensively, not entirely sure why he’s taking this so personally. “She’s really private about her life, okay?”

Kate laughs and nudges him with her foot. “Hey,” she says, gentler now and soft like she very rarely lets show. She waits until he turns to look at her, and she smiles and signs, like she always does when she’s being just a little more sincere, _I didn’t mean anything by it._ And then after a moment she adds, a gentle suggestion, “Just talk to her, okay? She seems like she might be a little lonely.”

Clint furrows his eyebrows at her. “Lonely?” he asks, something making his heart pound uncomfortably in his chest all of a sudden in a way that he can’t quite make sense of. 

Kate gives him an odd sort of thoughtful look, like he’s being particularly dense. “Well, wouldn’t you if you were living in a stranger’s apartment?” she asks. 

Clint swallows thickly and wonders why it feels like he’s got something caught in his throat. He wonders why he hasn’t thought of Natasha as a stranger lately, wonders if he even has the right to think of her as anyone other than the roommate he accidentally acquired several weeks ago. He wonders why it bothers him so much that he can’t figure it out.

\---

Clint doesn’t admit to it, but he ends up taking Kate’s advice, because he starts to notice that there’s something hesitant in the way Natasha keeps looking at him, something too cautious like she’s just waiting to be chased away. And so in the next few days, he makes a real, conscious effort to talk to Natasha more, especially when they’re both just puttering around the apartment with nothing better to do, and slowly, Clint sees this entirely new person unfurl in front of him. The cautiousness in Natasha’s step is still there, but she starts laughing more and she stops guarding her smiles like she’s afraid he’ll use them against her in some way. It makes something feel unnaturally light in Clint’s chest, like there’s something trying to burst through his ribcage, and he’s not sure what to do with this feeling.

He learns that Natasha knows how to speak Russian and French and Italian and Chinese, and that she’s Russian herself, and that she’s running (and she doesn’t exactly say this last bit explicitly, but when Clint asks her what brought her to America, she looks away and says something about needing to get away from home, something about needing a new start, and Clint knows a runaway when he sees one because he’s been that person before). Natasha knows how to cook and fix the satellite dish that Clint broke, and one day Natasha teaches Clint how to make soup from scratch because she claims that this is a skill every adult should have. Clint accidentally slices his thumb open trying to cut up carrots for the vegetable soup they’re making, which leads him to learn that Natasha is surprisingly good at first aid, and he cries while cutting the onions even though he’s very determined not to, but the soup turns out tasting surprisingly good, so it’s not a total loss. 

“You should teach me sign language,” Natasha says as they settle down to eat, sounding a little like she meant to say something else but changed her mind at the last second. 

Clint pauses from flipping through channels to find something watch on TV while they eat their dinner and turns to look at her, raising an eyebrow. Natasha shrugs. Steam rises from her soup and fogs up her glasses. Natasha wears glasses when she’s at home and contacts when she goes out, and it makes something shift under his skin to know that this might be something like a home to her.

“What?” she says, her voice smiling and light, though Clint could swear her smile wavers just a touch at the edges like she’s still unsure of her own footing. “I know you know how. I’ve seen you and Kate signing to each other. And I like languages and I live with you. I feel like this is something I should know.”

There’s something oddly warm and sincere running under the thread of Natasha’s voice, something like she really means it when she says she wants to learn. It knocks something loose in Clint’s chest, and he wonders what it means that it keeps feeling like his own breath is rattling in his chest every time he looks at her. 

“Uh, yeah,” he says, hating how his voice breaks almost imperceptibly and hoping she doesn’t notice. “Yeah, sure.”

And that’s how Clint finds himself spending the rest of his night teaching Natasha how to sign. Natasha frowns a little when she’s thinking hard, her eyebrows furrowing adorably, and Clint finds himself laughing without meaning to, because this is the easiest thing he’s done in a long time. 

\---

It’s almost surprising, after a few months, how normal this all feels, considering that Natasha is someone he doesn’t remember accidentally marrying over the internet, and Clint, who has never really fit into domesticity easily before, finds himself thinking that he could get used to this. And it’s not even really that Natasha is good at the things that Clint’s bad at, like cooking and cleaning and making sure they have coffee and milk; it’s more that somehow his rickety apartment finally feels like home, like all the empty corners are finally filled with the sort of life that they were meant to contain, like it’s somehow brighter in a way that has nothing to do with the new light fixtures that Natasha bought. It’s that Clint, who has been semi-nomadic his entire life, finally looks at his apartment and thinks of it as something more than a place to crash at night and he has no idea what he’s supposed to do now, which is probably why he’s been very resolutely ignoring the strange ache in his chest every time Natasha mentions that, no worries, she’ll be out of his hair as soon as she can leave without raising any red flags from immigration.

“You won’t have to put up with me for much longer,” she keeps saying, saying _put up with_ like this whole thing is some sort of laborious chore for him. 

He hates it, a little bit, that Natasha still thinks of herself as something temporary, even as she moves into his space and takes his dog on walks and drags him out to various thrift shops in the neighborhood he’s never noticed before. The way she acts towards him, it’s like she’s considering being at least friends with him, and yet at the same time, it’s like she has one foot out the door at all times, and Clint wants to somehow let her know that this is okay, that this can be home base for the both of them, but every time he thinks to do something about it, his whole body freezes up and he can’t find it in himself to even breathe again until she wanders out of the room. Instead, he tries smiling as he passes her a cup of coffee (black) and hands her the newspaper (folded so the day’s crossword is facing up) every morning and hopes that this, this acknowledgement that he’s here and wanting to accommodate her, wanting to learn her ins and outs, is enough.

\---

There’s this one night when Clint’s up late, pacing back and forth in his kitchen and shuffling through old police reports and recent newspaper clippings, trying to piece together some sort of discernable path to follow to defend his building against the thugs trying to burn it to the ground, and Natasha’s in the darkened living room, ostensibly watching TV, though Clint’s pretty sure she fell asleep hours ago, sprawled out on the couch. Part of him wants to wake her and get her into a real bed, but part of him also likes the comfort of having her there, so close to him. The TV’s still on, and even though Clint has long since taken out his hearing aids for the night, he can see it flickering out of the corner of his eye, can see the ends of Natasha’s hair tossed over the armrest of the couch, and it makes him feel a little less like it’s just him against the great wide world. 

Clint sets his papers down and leans his hands down on the counter, sighing and rolling his head back to work out a crick in his neck. On the TV, some cop on a crime show Natasha’s been marathoning all afternoon whips off his sunglasses and squints at a gruesome crime scene, reaching out to pick up a couple stray hairs that must be evidence. Clint almost laughs. If only it were that easy in real life. 

Natasha shifts suddenly in her sleep, the ends of her long hair swishing almost violently against the bright glow of the TV. Clint frowns. 

“Natasha?” he calls out, wanting to wake her, get her to sit up and smile and tell him it’s okay, she’s fine. 

He gets no response, and hesitates a moment before stepping around the island counter in the middle of his kitchen to venture into the living room. Natasha’s tossing and turning in her sleep, her face scrunched up in something that could be discomfort, could be fear. She’s murmuring something to herself, but Clint can’t read what she’s saying, because the light from the TV is too dim or because she’s not speaking English or both. 

“Natasha?” he tries again, louder this time, but Natasha sleeps fitfully on. Clint sighs and reaches out a hand to her arm, hoping to rouse her, “Hey, Natasha, c’mon wake up.”

The moment his hand touches her arm, she jerks awake, and her arm swings out, as if on instinct, and Clint narrowly avoids getting punched in the face. He lets out a yelp as he stumbles backwards and ends up crashing into the coffee table and falling to the floor, staring wide-eyed at Natasha, who’s awake now and wide-eyed herself and looking more scared than Clint has ever wanted to see from her. Natasha stares at him like she’s never seen him before, something in her eyes painfully vulnerable and young like she’s expecting the worst from him, and it makes Clint ache thinking about what could have put that fear in her. 

Clint takes a breath to steady himself and hopes that his voice doesn’t shake too much when he speaks. “You okay?” he asks because Natasha’s looking at him like she’s just crawled her way out of death, and Clint’s never seen anything like it. 

Natasha’s mouth drops open and then she stops and closes her mouth again like she thinks better of it. Instead, she signs, _I’m fine. It was just a bad dream._

And Clint would be more inclined to believe her if her hands weren’t shaking as she signs it all out to him, but she doesn’t give him the opportunity to do anything about it, because as soon as she finishes, she looks away and then a second later, she’s sweeping out of the room and shutting her bedroom door before Clint can even think. 

Clint wants to run after her, wants to say something, do something, but he’s not sure what he’s supposed to in a situation like this. Instead, he tries to bury himself in his work again, tries to focus on tracking down the mobsters he’s after, but his thoughts keep straying to Natasha, and he ends up spending the rest of the night wondering who could’ve gotten under her skin like this, because the terror that Clint caught flickering in Natasha’s eyes isn’t the sort of fear that gets there easily. This is the fear that’s conditioned in after too many years of being something too sharp; it’s the look that Clint’s seen too many times doing the sort of espionage work that he does, and yet this somehow rattles him to the core, more than he’s ever really felt, trying to imagine what could do that to a person. 

\---

“Your girl’s ex-KGB,” Maria Hill tells him a couple days after he puts in the call and is all but kidnapped from the rooftop of his building by SHIELD agents hoisting up to the helicarrier. 

Clint’s eyebrows shoot up to his hairline in disbelief (though when he thinks about it, the spy background does explain some things, like how she was able to break into his laptop that first day or fix the satellite dish or why she can speak so many languages), and Maria shoves a thin folder his way. Clint takes it slowly from her, feeling, on one hand, guilty for intruding into Natasha’s life and, on the other hand, terrified in a very real way that whatever’s been scaring Natasha has somehow followed her here, despite the fact that Natasha keeps insisting that she’s fine and keeps refusing to tell him anything. He lives with her, he figures. If she’s in danger, he has a right to know. He takes a breath and flips it open, unsure of what he’s expecting to find. 

“From what I can gather, which isn’t much,” Maria says in her crisp, efficient syllables, “She was part of a special ops program. Seems like she was in pretty deep. She dropped off the grid about five years ago, and since then, she’s popped up a couple times to pull odd jobs here and there, and she’s actually shown up on our radar a few times, but she’s been kind of a ghost. Hard to catch. Looks like she came here for a fresh start.”

Clint frowns at the dossier in his hands, at the documents written in several different languages. He lifts up a small black and white picture of a girl who looks like Natasha, only fifteen or twenty years younger with long pigtails, staring through the barrier of the photo at him with harsh, hollow eyes. Clint swallows against the lump in his throat. 

Maria crosses her arms and raises an eyebrow at him, one corner of her mouth quirking up into a smirk. “I’d warn you against using departmental resources for personal reasons, but since Romanov is someone we’ve had our eye on for a while, I’ll let it go just this once,” she says, and then her expression shifts into something a little more thoughtful, inscrutable like how Kate looks at him when she thinks he’s being unreasonably difficult. “Why do you care so much, Barton? I mean, I know you’re married and all, but word on the street that it was an accident.”

Clint rolls his eyes and snaps the folder shut. “Who told you that?” he asks, more bantering than accusatory, because Maria has this way of just _knowing_ , and she takes great delight in very much not telling him how she knows anything. 

“You think I wouldn’t notice something like this about one of my agents?” Maria scoffs and then laughs at his unimpressed expression, waving his off. As she turns away, she calls over her shoulder, “Don’t come back to me about this if it’s not for work, okay? Now, get off my helicarrier. Some of us have jobs to do.”

Clint snorts. “Thanks, Maria,” he says flatly as he’s strapped back into a harness and summarily dropped back down onto his apartment’s rooftop by a crew of SHIELD agents just about as quickly as he was picked up. 

He raises the folder up to shade his eyes against the sun as he watches the helicarrier lift away and disappear from sight. From the door that leads out to the roof, Lucky comes bounding over and bumping his nose against Clint’s hand. Clint pats Lucky’s head absently and looks over to where he came from. By the door, Natasha’s standing with her arms crossed, leaning against the door frame, her mouth pulled up into that crooked, amused smile he’s come to know so well, her lips pressed together like she’s trying not to let the laughter in her throat out. 

“Friends of yours?” she asks, her light voice tripping over the surface of his skin like something warm.

Clint smiles and walks over, tucking the folder under his arm, hoping she won’t see her name stamped at the top. ”Yeah, buddies from work,” he laughs. “They love making a scene for my neighbors.”

He pauses in front of Natasha, who tilts her head to look up at him in a sort of deliberate way that Clint doesn’t know how to read. Her hair’s half pulled up into a bun and she’s holding a little bag of dog treats in her hand and Clint is overcome with the inexplicable urge to gather up the loose ends of her hair in his hands. 

“Do you want to get tacos for dinner?” Natasha asks, and she’s doing that thing again where Clint is pretty sure that she’s trying to say something else, hidden under the layers of careful normalcy. 

Clint shrugs. “Sure,” he says, and Natasha nods and smiles, turning away to head back downstairs, cooing softly at Lucky for him to follow her. 

Clint watches her petite form disappear down the stairs, watching her with a sense of newfound wonder at the delicate power in her small frame, thinking about her, ten years old and being trained to kill, thinking about her, twenty-something and running away from the only home she’s ever known. Clint wonders what it’s like, carrying that weight on weary shoulders every day, and knows that it’s the sort of ache he’ll never come close to knowing, even though he feels heavy down to his bones. 

“Clint?” Natasha calls up the stairs, appearing again at the base of the stairs when Clint lingers too long in the rooftop doorway.

Clint blinks. “Yeah,” he says, shaking himself out of his thoughts to trot down the stairs. “Yeah, coming.”

Natasha’s shoulder bumps against his as they walk down the hall to Clint’s apartment and her hair smells like the lavender shampoo she bought the other day. She smiles up at him, and Clint feels something flip in his stomach and wonders what the hell he got himself into.

\---

He ends up stashing the folder Maria gave him under his mattress and keeps making plans to talk to Natasha about it, to ask her if she really thinks her past is going to catch up with her, to ask her if there’s anything she needs from him, but he finds that he doesn’t know how to broach the subject. He doesn’t want to spook her by just springing it on her, but at the same time, there’s no easy way to segue into saying, _say, I heard through the grapevine that you’re on the run from the KGB – you need any help with that?_ So he keeps putting it off and runs errands with her instead, helps her pick out new hair dye when she decides she wants to make her hair darker and more auburn instead of fiery red, spends his evenings fixing up broken arrows and trying out new ones with her over bad TV and takeout and beer. He makes her laugh and makes her coffee and goes to check on her when Lucky wakes him up because she’s fussing and pacing again at the nightmares that she keeps having and refusing to explain directly, hoping that at some point she’ll come around to trusting him enough to come to him about it on her own, hoping that they’ll get to a point where she feels like she can talk about this head-on instead of just dropping vague hints every now and again.

Only it doesn’t happen, and weeks and months slip by without Clint realizing, and he looks up one day and realizes that he doesn’t quite know the order of his life without Natasha in it anymore. And she still lives in his spare bedroom and still doesn’t quite let him in, but she’s there next to him every night, talking for hours with him on the couch, her legs thrown comfortably across his lap like they’re the type of people who can afford to indulge in intimacy on a regular basis. When she laughs, her nose scrunching and her eyes curving into two crescent moons, Clint almost finds himself believing it. 

And then, one day, many months after Natasha first showed up in Clint’s life, he comes home from patrolling with Kate, and immediately notices that something feels off. Lucky runs up to greet them and licks at Clint’s fingers. 

“Hey, buddy,” Clint says, crouching to pet him distractedly. 

Kate sets her bow down by the door and slips her coat off. “Huh,” she says, looking around the apartment thoughtfully. “Did you redecorate or something? Something’s different.”

Clint frowns at the uneasiness settling in his chest, standing again and noticing for the first time, the distinct quiet that’s not usually here, the lack of humming or singing or rustling of parts of the apartment being reorganized. Something cold trickles into his stomach like ice. 

“Natasha?” he calls out, and then when he gets no response, he calls out again, louder this time, feeling his heart begin to thump against his ribcage, “Natasha? You here?”

Lucky barks. Natasha’s not here and Lucky is, and Natasha always brings Lucky with her when she goes out. Clint swallows against the lump in his throat. 

“Uh, Clint?” Kate says from where she’s wandered over to the door of Clint’s spare bedroom. She looks at him with eyes that are sad and sorry and too careful, “I think she’s gone.”

Clint walks over to the bedroom and when he looks in, his breath leaves him in a long _whoosh_. It’s empty, save for the bed and the dresser that were in there to begin with. All the posters and clothing and various little knickknacks that have come to make this space distinctly Natasha’s space are gone, even the bed sheets stripped away to leave just a bare mattress. It could almost be like she was never here, except that Clint feels the unique shape of her absence.

“Clint?” Kate ventures quietly from next to him, gentle like she’s afraid of saying the wrong thing. Her hand touches down lightly on his arm, and when he turns to look at her, she signs, _You okay?_

Clint looks away. _I’m fine_ , he signs as he stares at the vast emptiness of the bedroom that used to be Natasha’s. _Don’t worry about it_.

\---

Clint discovers, later that night, that Natasha left him a note – a little purple sticky note stuck to the top of a tupperware of her famous potato soup. 

_Clint,_ it reads, _Thanks for everything. –N_

There’s no phone number, no address, no contact information whatsoever. Clint knows what it means to be a runner, knows the kind of care that necessitates, but it still stings that she wouldn’t care enough to give him a way to reach her (or maybe it’s not about how much she cares, maybe it’s about trust, and somehow that stings just a little bit more).

Kate finds him, several hours later after coming back from running some errands, eating potato soup and glaring at the note, and she heaves a sigh. She snatches the note away from him and when he looks up and splutters, she just raises her eyebrows at him.

 _Either let her go or go find her_ , she signs to him. _You’re a spy and a superhero. Stop sitting around and moping like you can’t do anything about this._

Clint glares at her and continues shoveling soup in his mouth. She’s probably right, but he’s never going to admit to it.

\---

“This better not be about your girl, Barton,” Maria says as he walks up to her desk.

He’s on the helicarrier to be briefed about a new mission he’s going to be embarking on in a week’s time, and he’s hoping that Maria’s in a good mood today. He doesn’t even bother asking how Maria knows Natasha’s missing in the first place. He leans his hip on her desk and frowns.

“C’mon, Maria,” he whines. “We’re friends.”

Maria scoffs and keeps scrolling through the steady stream of data popping up on her computer screen. “I’m your boss, Clint,” she says flatly. 

“ _And_ my friend?” Clint tries. They’ve spent enough time to be considered friends. Probably.

Maria sighs and leans back in her chair, staring up at Clint with eyes that are unimpressed bordering on impatient. Clint winces. Not a good mood, then.

“Clint, I’ve got nuclear launch code sales in Bulgaria that I have to stop and an international human trafficking ring to shut down and some maniac in San Francisco thinking he can take over the world from there, so unless your girl’s caught up in any of this, I’ve got more important things on my hands,” she says. Her expression turns a touch softer after a second or two and she tries for a smile, “Look, I’m sorry you lost her, but my hands are tied right now. If you want to find her, you’re going to have to do it on your own.”

Clint sighs and crosses his arms. In truth, he didn’t really expect Maria to help him again, but he was hoping she was feeling particularly generous. 

“You’re one of my best,” Maria says, turning back to her work. “If anyone can figure this out, it’s you.”

Clint laughs and pushes away from Maria’s desk. “Yeah, well I’m not the one with Level 10 clearance,” he says over his shoulder. 

Maria snorts. Just as he hits the doorway to her office, she calls after him, softly, “I hope you find her.”

Clint just smiles and slips out of her office, hating the words caught in his throat, _Me too._

\---

Clint looks for Natasha. Or anyway, he does his best. But he only ends up having about a week in New York before he’s sent out on SHIELD business, and then he’s in Madripoor and Shanghai and Geneva and by the time he gets home again and has the time and energy to actually look for her, it’s been months. Any leads he may have been able to find have long since gone cold, and Clint thinks that it’s probably a lost cause and considers giving up, never mind that his apartment feels too big for just him, never mind that he comes home some days and half expects to see Natasha curled up on the corner of his couch, reading a book or watching TV. It makes his heart fall out of the bottom of his ribcage every time, and yet as much as he digs around for new information on Natasha, it’s like she never existed in the first place. She’s disappeared perfectly, and all Clint has left is the empty spaces she used to occupy. 

It’s several months after Natasha left that he gets a call. It’s late at night, and he’s up watching a movie with Lucky lying across his legs, and when his phone rings, buzzing violently against the couch, it startles him so badly that he almost kicks Lucky in the face. He gropes for the hearing aids that he took out earlier, putting them in before reaching for his phone. The call is from a blocked number. 

“Hello?” Clint says. 

For a moment, all he hears is static, and then a soft voice crackles through. “Clint?”

Clint stifles a yelp, his heart suddenly jumping into his throat at the familiar sound, already trying to talk himself down from the excitement in case he’s just hearing what he wants to hear. 

There’s a shuffling sound and something like glass clinking, and then, “Clint, it’s Natasha. I, uh, sorry, that I—”

She clears her throat, and the rest of her sentence is lost to the static. Clint finds himself smiling without meaning to, something light and giddy inexplicably welling up in his chest. 

“You okay?” he asks, trying to keep his voice as gentle and quiet a possible, afraid that he’ll scare Natasha off, because she’s always been a little like a skittish animal. “You left kind of suddenly.”

Natasha laughs and she sounds exhausted. He hears the clinking of glass again and the soft swish of something that sounds like it could be liquid. He wonders if she’s drinking, wonders how drunk she is. 

“I had some stuff I needed to take care of,” Natasha says, sighing. There’s a silence and then she says, quieter now, her words slurring together a little, “I have funds stashed all over the country. I needed to pick them up.”

Clint lets himself laugh softly. “That how you got all that money to buy Lucky all that fancy stuff?” he asks lightly. 

There’s a long, sighing sound like she’s letting out a long breath. “Yeah, I had some cash in Manhattan,” she says, and then lets the silence settle in around them. It drags on for so long that Clint almost starts to worry that the call dropped, but then Natasha says again, “I’m sorry. I—“ Clint hears a _thump_ , and then Natasha mutters, “Fuck.” 

Clint hears rustling as she shuffles around and rights whatever she must’ve knocked over, and then Natasha says suddenly, like she can’t help herself, “I miss you.”

And then, “Shit. I— Fuck.”

And then nothing. She hangs up before Clint can get a word in, and leaves him with his heart racing and his skin feeling two sizes too small. He lets his head fall back on the couch with a long sigh, trying to get his nerves to settle. Lucky whines and crawls up to rest his head on Clint’s chest.

Clint stares up at the ceiling and scratches at Lucky’s head, wondering if his entire life is some sort of bizarre dream. “What the hell am I supposed to do now, Lucky?”

\---

The call from Natasha is, predictably, untraceable, and she doesn’t call again, even as the weeks drag by, and it goes on for so long that Clint starts to wonder if he just imagined the whole thing, because it’s starting to feel a little unreal. And yet every time the phone rings, he half expects it to be Natasha again, as unreasonable as that may be, and it gets to the point where Kate rolls her eyes and crosses her arms and puts her foot down, because _Jesus fucking Christ, Clint this is getting ridiculous_. 

“She clearly doesn’t want to be found,” Kate says, stepping between him and the ringing phone that’s probably just a call from a neighbor or SHIELD or anyone else who’s very much not Natasha. “You need to stop driving yourself crazy about this.”

“ _She_ called _me_ ,” Clint says, trying to step past her to get to the phone.

“Exactly,” Kate says, nudging his hand away. “She’ll come find you if and when she wants, and you have other things in your life to think about until she does.”

“You were the one who told me to go find her,” he protests, even though he knows it’s useless, even though he knows he needs to drop this before it consumes his whole life. He’s just not very good at letting go. 

“That was before she made it very clear that she doesn’t want to be found right now,” Kate says, gentler now, like she gets it, like she knows what this feels like, and sometimes Clint forgets how much Kate has gone through despite being only twenty-one. She pokes at the center of his chest emphatically. “Now stop obsessing.”

Clint sighs. “Fine,” he says and waves her off so he can finally answer the phone. “Now move. This might be important.”

It’s SHIELD, and Clint doesn’t know why he still honestly expects it to be anyone else.

\---

She’ll come find him when she’s ready. This is what Clint tells himself every day when he comes home to an empty apartment. She’ll come back when she wants to. 

Clint doesn’t even know why he’s so convinced that she’ll come back or why he wants this so badly, but all he knows is that when he wakes up every morning and wanders out to make coffee for himself and no one else, he feels a little hollow in a way that he never quite understood before Natasha crashed into his life. He doesn’t know why he feels this so strongly, why he misses the irrational little things more than he’d ever expect – the way her hair curls around her face after a shower, the way she spins a pen across her fingers as she does the crossword puzzle every morning, the way she has to stand on her toes to reach her favorite mug in Clint’s cupboards. All he knows is that he feels it somewhere in his gut, knows without knowing why or how—

She’ll be back. She just has to. He’s not sure if he knows how to make sense of his world otherwise.

\---

Almost two years after Natasha first showed up on Clint’s doorstep, Clint comes home after an early meeting with Maria Hill and walks into his apartment and starts at the smell of pancakes. He looks up from fiddling with his phone and almost drops it at the sight of Natasha puttering around his kitchen and making what appears to be blueberry pancakes. Lucky’s lying by her feet and she looks over when she hears him come in and smiles like nothing’s changed, like she didn’t disappear without a trace almost a year ago. 

Clint walks dumbly over to the counter and sits down on a stool by the kitchen island because he doesn’t know what else to do with himself and she slides a cup of coffee to him. She looks more tired than he remembers her being last time he saw her, a little sunken around the eyes and paler than usual, and her hair’s been cut short in a way that makes her cheekbones look sharper, but it’s her all the same, the soft, secret smile and the way she smells like something delicate and floral despite all her sharp edges. She sets a plate of pancakes down in front of Clint and leans on the counter opposite him, cradling a mug of coffee in her hands. 

She doesn’t say anything for a long moment, just stands quietly and drinks her coffee, watching him like she’s waiting for something. Clint tries to eat his food, but can’t even take a bite before he gets too impatient and curious, and ends up picking aimlessly at his pancakes instead. 

“Did you find what you were looking for?” he asks her, and he’s not even sure he knows what he means by it, and he doesn’t know that she knows either, but she smiles a little into her coffee, so Clint doesn’t bother taking it back.

“Yeah,” she says, taking a long sip of her coffee and looking away. 

A quiet moment settles around them, and Clint finally takes a bite of his pancakes. He hasn’t had blueberry pancakes since she left (mostly because he’s not very good at picking out fruit and only a little bit because it feels wrong to do this without her, which is dumb, so he doesn’t like to talk about it), and the taste in his mouth feels so much like coming home even though he never left that he doesn’t know what to do with himself.

 _What brings you back?_ Clint signs to her, because he’s afraid of what he might say if he lets himself speak right now.

Natasha clears her throat and sets her coffee down. She picks up a thin manila envelope Clint didn’t notice before and slides it across the counter to him. She frowns as she waits for him to open it, like she’s anxious or worried or just impatient. Clint lets out a breath when he pulls out the papers inside. 

“Divorce papers,” he says around the sigh, setting the papers down on the counter so she won’t see his hands shake. 

Natasha shrugs and looks down at her coffee. “I, uh, left in a bit of a hurry,” she says firmly, sounding almost like she’s determined to say this no matter what. “I had some pressing things to take care of, or I would’ve stayed a little longer. But everything’s done now, so I thought I’d give you a chance to sign these if you wanted to.”

Clint stares at her. It’s back, he notices, the old carefulness about her, the way she’s sidestepping instead of just saying what she means. He wonders if this is what solitude does to her, if it brings out the caution that’s been trained into her bones. He wonders how she can stand it, never knowing if there’s someone out there who has her back. 

_Is that what_ you _want?_ he signs. 

Natasha blinks at him, her head jerking back a fraction of an inch like she’s just been hit. She opens her mouth and no words come out, and it’s like no one has ever asked her before what _she_ wants, like no one has ever cared. It makes Clint’s chest ache, thinking about the sort of upbringing that does this to a person. 

“I mean,” Clint says, his voice finding him again. “I know this whole thing was an accident and all, and I was probably never supposed to be the person you married, but I— I like you, Natasha, a lot, and I know it was never supposed to be this way and this was just meant to be a way for you to get out, but all I know is that I think I like it a lot more when you’re here than when you’re not. And unless I’m seriously terrible at this, I think you’re at least considering feeling the same way about me. So why are you asking me to sign these papers?”

“I— I didn’t—” Natasha tries and then snaps her mouth shut, pressing her lips together into a thin line. She draws in a careful breath and when she lets it out, she says, slowly, like she’s measuring out every word, “I know you know my history. You know that I’m not built for things like this. I’d just mess it up.”

Clint laughs, suddenly feeling light and giddy begin to take shape in his chest, because that’s a deflection but it’s not a no, not quite. 

“Natasha,” he says incredulously. “Have we met? I’ve messed up almost every relationship I’ve ever been in. What makes you think I would be any better?”

Natasha eyes him cautiously, like she’s worried this is some sort of trap. “And you still want this?” she asks slowly. Clint wonders when the last time she knew she was loved was. 

“Yeah,” Clint says, his voice almost breaking around the word, because he hasn’t felt something this sincerely in a long time. 

“I won’t always be able to be here,” Natasha says, as if she’s still trying to scare him off. 

Clint shrugs. “Neither will I,” he says. And then he smiles, trying to get that softness he’s missed so much back into her eyes. “I’m a spy too, remember?”

Natasha snorts, which Clint probably shouldn’t find as cute as he does. “You’re a glorified assassin,” she says, deadpan, and it’s not quite the light, teasing lilt that Clint’s gotten so used to, but it’s close, it’s a start. 

Clint smiles and steps around the island counter, drawing closer to her but not touching her. The corner of her mouth turns up, just a touch, and Clint thinks that he would give anything to know that he’s allowed to have this, for whatever time she’ll have him. 

“So you going to stay?” he asks. “Or do you still want that divorce?”

Natasha laughs, something sounding like chimes spilling out of her throat, and she doesn’t say no, and she doesn’t say yes, but she doesn’t bring up the papers again either, lets them sit forgotten on the kitchen counter. And she stays instead of running away and cooks dinner with him and tiptoes into his bedroom that night as if this is what they’ve been doing all along. She slips into bed next to him and he can feel that she’s been inches away from running this whole time, but the point is that she doesn’t run, and when Clint wakes the next morning, she’s curled herself against his side, the ends of her hair tickling at his neck. 

There’s something about her that feels so different now than when Clint first met her, he thinks as he fiddles with a red curl. There’s something about her now that feels more grounded and settled, despite the flightiness that’s so deeply ingrained into her bones. He wouldn’t worry now that if she were to leave, that she wouldn’t come back. He can just see it in the sleepy blink of her eyes as she slowly rouses that she feels it too, that this, just the two of them, here like this, this is home. 

\---

Kate doesn’t even bat an eye when Clint tells her the news. She just shrugs, fiddles with her arrows, and takes a sip of her coffee as they perch atop a building, patrolling, ostensibly. 

“I told you you’d find her,” she says. 

Clint rolls his eyes at her. “I didn’t find her,” he says, because he’s an adult but he can’t help being a little bit childish at times and he hates admitting that Kate’s right about things. “She found me.”

Kate laughs, sliding her sunglasses down over her eyes against the glare of the sun. “Well,” she says, leaning back where they’re perched, their legs dangling off the side of the building. There’s something about her voice that’s sincere and quiet in a way that she only gets, very privately. “That’s sort of the same thing, isn’t it?”

Clint opens his mouth to retort, but finds that he can’t think of anything appropriate to say, because she’s right, in a way. It’s that she found him and he found her, and that’s probably all either of them can say about it, in the end. 

Kate grins at him, the sincerity in her face melting away to her usual cheekiness. “You’re welcome, by the way,” she says cheerfully, kicking her feet. 

Clint raises an eyebrow at her. “For what?” he asks flatly, entirely unimpressed. 

“For suggesting that you get yourself a mail order bride,” she says, eyes shining. “Without me, you never would’ve met Natasha.”

Clint scoffs and threatens to push her off the building, thinking at the same time, of all the misguided mistakes he’s made in his life, this one, meeting Natasha, is by far the best thing that has ever happened. 

\---

**Epilogue.**

Clint is dancing about his kitchen as he nudges at his pancakes and pours out coffee (one black, one with cream and plenty of sugar) when Natasha wanders down from the bedroom some months later. She’s got her hair pulled up in a neat, tight ponytail and she’s dressed neatly in crisp, dark jeans and a bright white t-shirt, one of her customary leather jackets slung over her arm. It’s unlike the comfy sweatpants and oversized shirts that he’s gotten used to seeing her lounge around the apartment in, and it’s times like this, when she’s dressed so sharply and her hair is pulled back to reveal the harshness hidden in her features, that Clint remembers that she’s been trained her whole life to be a killer. She raises her eyebrows at him and eyes the stove. 

“Are you making breakfast?” she asks dubiously, which is probably warranted since Clint has the tendency to burn everything he tries to cook. 

Clint grins and lifts the pancakes out onto a plate before pouring out more batter into the pan. They’re only a little bit burnt. He’s gotten better at this. 

“It’s your first day at work,” he says cheerfully. “I’m celebrating.” 

(She’d gotten the job offer from Maria Hill a couple weeks ago, and she finally accepted the other night. 

“You don’t have to do this,” Clint kept saying. “You went through so much trouble to get out of the business.”

And each time, Natasha just shrugged and said, “I think we both know that people like us don’t really just get out. But it’d be nice to be fighting for the good guys for once.”

Clint isn’t upset that she’ll be working with him from now on – in fact, he’s been ecstatic since Maria called him the other day to say that if Natasha passes all her evaluations, she’ll be working as Clint’s partner – but sometimes he wonders if she really wants to do this or if she just thinks that this is all she’s meant for.)

He holds out a cup of coffee to her as he finishes up making the pancakes. “Your coffee, Mrs. Barton.”

Natasha rolls her eyes and sets her jacket down on the counter, taking the coffee from him. “Thank you, Mr. Romanov,” she says as she takes a sip.

He feels her eyes on him again, and when he turns around with a couple plates stacked high with only slightly burnt pancakes, he notices that she’s staring at his faded purple t-shirt with the holes in the sleeves and his threadbare jeans. 

“Are you seriously wearing that to work?” she asks, taking her pancakes from him.

Clint looks down at what he’s wearing and makes a face. “What?” he says. “It’s not like SHIELD has a strict dress code or anything.”

Natasha laughs and shoves a bite of food in her mouth. “Don’t you have any sense of professional pride?” she asks, her voice muffled because her mouth is full and this should definitely not be as cute as it is. 

“You’re the one who said we’re basically glorified assassins,” he says. “Professional pride is relative.”

Natasha rolls her eyes at him and checks her phone and says something about if they don’t hurry they’ll be late, to which Clint responds that _late_ is relative too, which makes her kick at his shins and try very hard not to look amused at all. They end up getting to the helicarrier that’ll take them to SHIELD’s DC headquarters for her initial training about a minute ahead of time, and Natasha glares at him before he can say _I told you so_ , but it’s probably written all over his face anyways. 

“I’ll see you at lunch?” Clint offers before Natasha goes off to begin the various psych screenings that stand between her and real, meaningful field work. 

“Sure,” Natasha says, stepping up onto her toes to brush a kiss across his lips. She smiles at him, and Clint feels something warm flood all the way down to his toes. 

As she walks away, Maria comes up to Clint, her arms crossed and her eyebrows raised. “You know,” she says flatly, “If I’d known the two of you were so sickening, I never would’ve offered her the job.”

Clint snorts. “Thanks.”

Maria watches him thoughtfully for a moment, and then she asks, “Was it worth it? Waiting for her all this time? You happy?”

Clint blinks at her, his chest feeling inexplicably tight at her words. Natasha catches his eye from across the room, making a goofy face at him when the psychologist she’s being introduced to looks away for a moment, and Clint feels himself smiling before he can even think it. 

“Yeah,” he says to Maria, feeling the full weight of the sincerity of those words for perhaps the first time, “Yeah, I am.”

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading!! comments and kudos are very much appreciated!
> 
> also come find me on [tumblr](http://nataliaromonoff.tumblr.com/) if you like!


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